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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Authors:
Emmert-Fees↗K. M. F↗Meyer↗Laxy↗Hanselmann↗

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Driven-dissipative entanglement of distant giant atoms

Authors:
Aziza Almanakly↗Ariadna Soro↗Alejandro Vivas-Via\~na↗Beatriz Yankelevich↗Caspar Groiseau↗David Pahl↗Junyoung An↗Gabriel Cutter↗Michael E. Gingras↗Bethany M. Niedzielski↗Hannah Stickler↗Ren\'ee DeP\'encier Pi\~nero↗…

arXiv:2606.13375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum interconnects distribute entanglement via controlled light-matter interactions for quantum computing and sensing applications. Many entanglement generation schemes use coherent, reversible interactions that require precisely calibrated pulses to execute. In contrast, driven-dissipative protocols use a continuous-wave drive in the presence of correlated dissipation to stabilize entanglement in protected (dark) states. However, the same dissipation that generates the entanglement also limits its utility once the stabilization protocol ends. Here, we engineer a superconducting system of two giant artificial atoms coupled sequentially to a waveguide, with tunable individual and correlated dissipation enabled by interference between coupling points. Continuously driving the atoms through the waveguide exploits correlated dissipation to generate remote entanglement. We then tune the qubit frequencies in situ to suppress individual dissipation and thereby preserve the entanglement, achieving a Bell-state fidelity F = 0.89 +/- 0.02. This demonstration indicates that the driven dissipation of giant atoms is a viable approach for distributing entanglement across quantum networks.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reliable quantification of renal function from frozen blood samples

Authors:
French↗S. R↗Culwell↗G. C↗Wiskoski↗H. E↗Arias↗J. C↗Zahra↗Escareno↗C. E↗Heitkamp↗…

BACKGROUND: Differences in renal function may affect Alzheimer disease (AD) blood biomarker levels independent of AD pathology. Although renal function was unaccounted for in foundational AD blood biomarker studies, there is potential to address this through quantification of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from frozen serum and plasma samples. However, the validity of eGFR evaluation from long-term frozen blood samples is unknown. METHODS: Adults aged 50-85 with at least 2 vascular risk factors were recruited from vascular surgery or cardiology clinics in Tucson, Arizona from 2022-2025. Individuals with creatinine assessments in point-of-care whole blood (POC-WB) and frozen serum and plasma samples using the iSTAT (Abbott) were included. eGFR was calculated using the 2021 CKD-EPI creatinine equation without race. Agreement between POC-WB and frozen blood samples was assessed using Cohen's kappa with linear weights. RESULTS: 134 participants (mean [SD] age: 72.6 [7.5] years, 39.6% female, 23.1% chronic kidney disease) had POC-WB eGFR available. Frozen serum and plasma samples had strong agreement with POC-WB for eGFR (Kw= 0.90-0.95, P

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

First Proof Second Batch

Authors:
Mohammed Abouzaid↗Nikhil Srivastava↗Rachel Ward↗Lauren Williams↗

arXiv:2606.18119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To assess the ability of current AI systems to correctly solve research-level mathematics problems, we tested several AI systems on a set of ten problems in a broad range of mathematical fields; these problems arose naturally in the research process of the contributors. This document includes the problems, our methodology, and the results of our testing. We provide links to supplementary documents including the human solutions, the AI-generated solutions, and the referee reports and logs for the AI-generated solutions. The ten problems were contributed by the following mathematicians: (1) Dariusz Kaloci\'nski and Theodore A. Slaman, (2) Richard Schwartz, (3) Aleksa Milojevic and Benny Sudakov, (4) Larry Guth, (5) Oleg Butkovsky, Jonathan Mattingly, and Lorenzo Zambotti, (6) Joshua Evan Greene and Duncan McCoy, (7) Sucharit Sarkar, (8) Sam Payne and Jidong (Jayden) Wang, (9) Sylvie Corteel and John Lentfer, (10) Srivatsav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli.

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06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EquiDexFlow: Contact-Grounded SE(3)-Equivariant Dexterous Grasp Generative Flows

Authors:
Clinton Enwerem↗John S. Baras↗Calin Belta↗

Most learned dexterous grasp generators relegate contact forces to a downstream verification step, so a kinematically-plausible pose can still violate the conditions for a stable physical grasp. We address this with EquiDexFlow, an SE(3)-equivariant flow-matching model that jointly predicts wrist pose, joint angles, fingertip contacts, surface normals, and contact forces from an object point cloud. Our architecture projects contacts onto the object surface and forces into the Coulomb friction cone by construction, so placement and friction compliance hold without loss penalties. We prove end-to-end SE(3) equivariance and verify it empirically over 200 rotations, with wrist residuals below $0.04^\circ$ and exactly zero joint deviation. Trained on 8,100 force-closure grasps across 81 objects for the 16-DoF Allegro Hand, our model achieves zero friction violations, the best composite score, and the lowest wrench residual among all ablation variants. We retarget decoded fingertip contacts to a 16-DoF LEAP Hand via per-finger inverse kinematics, and our hardware-feasible refinement places every joint at least 5% inside its actuator envelope while preserving wrench balance. On the physical robot, retargeted EquiDexFlow-decoded grasps complete open-loop pick-and-hold trials on all six test objects, with every asymmetric object succeeding at both the canonical pose and a $120^\circ$ co-rotation. Videos, code, and checkpoints are available at https://equidexflow.github.io.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Authors:
Yue Zhao↗Qingqing Gu↗Xiaoyu Wang↗Teng Chen↗Zhonglin Jiang↗Yong Chen↗Hongyan Li↗Luo Ji↗

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Rethinking Psychometric Evaluation of LLMs: When and Why Self-Reports Predict Behavior

Authors:
Rafal Kocielnik↗Pengrui Han↗Peiyang Song↗Myrl G. Marmarelis↗Ramit Debnath↗Dean Mobbs↗Anima Anandkumar↗R. Michael Alvarez↗

Anticipating LLM behavioral tendencies from low-cost psychometric probes is critical for safe deployment, but only if self-reports (SR) reliably predict behavior. Recent work documented substantial SR-behavior dissociation in LLMs, but relied on broad personality traits (Big 5) that predict specific behaviors weakly, even in humans. Furthermore, the isolation of conversational sessions combined with weak context matching left open whether LLMs truly lack coherence or whether the conditions needed to detect such coherence were not met. We contrast Big 5 with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which measures intention targeted to a specific behavior and predicts human behavior substantially better than broad traits. We run experiments across four behavioral tasks and 11 frontier LLMs, while also varying session context and identity induction. We find that SR-behavior coherence exists but is selective. 1) Within a shared conversation, the Theory of Planned Behavior reaches human-level coherence; Big 5 does not. 2) Across separate conversations, coherence survives only for behaviors anchored outside the immediate prompt, such as implicit bias shaped by training, and collapses when behavior is strongly primed by context, as with sycophancy. 3) Persona prompting makes self-reports more consistent across conversations, but does not bring behavior into alignment. These findings suggest that coarse personality frameworks, such as Big 5 may not be the best tools for testing deployment behavior. More task- and behavior-specific instruments are needed, and even these must be evaluated across tasks and contexts.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TIMI: Training-Free Image-to-3D Multi-Instance Generation with Spatial Fidelity

Authors:
Xiao Cai↗Pengpeng Zeng↗Ji Zhang↗Heng Tao Shen↗Jingkuan Song↗Lianli Gao↗

Precise spatial fidelity in Image-to-3D multi-instance generation is critical for downstream real-world applications. Recent work attempts to address this by fine-tuning pre-trained Image-to-3D (I23D) models on multi-instance datasets, which incurs substantial training overhead and struggles to guarantee spatial fidelity. In fact, we observe that pre-trained I23D models already possess meaningful spatial priors, which remain underutilized as evidenced by instance entanglement issues. Motivated by this, we propose TIMI, a novel Training-free framework for Image-to-3D Multi-Instance generation that achieves high spatial fidelity. Specifically, we first introduce an Instance-aware Separation Guidance (ISG) module, which facilitates instance disentanglement during the early denoising stage. Next, to stabilize the guidance introduced by ISG, we devise a Spatial-stabilized Geometry-adaptive Update (SGU) module that promotes the preservation of the geometric characteristics of instances while maintaining their relative relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields better performance in terms of both global layout and distinct local instances compared to existing multi-instance methods, without requiring additional training and with faster inference speed.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

Authors:
Roko Peran↗Luka Hobor↗Mihael Kovac↗Mario Brcic↗

arXiv:2606.15577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in complex mathematical optimization, even if the pragmatic user who triggers them is unaware of it. After all, many real-world problems reduce to the search for better or the best solutions. The field of LLM-as-optimizer has three paradigms: direct optimization, tool-augmented optimization, and tool-creating optimization. Direct optimization uses iterative prompting and heuristic generation to navigate solution spaces. Tool-augmented optimization translates natural language problems into formal specifications and orchestrates external solvers. Tool-creating optimization goes further, using LLMs to discover reusable algorithms or heuristics that can be deployed at zero marginal LLM cost. We describe current performance frontiers based on the benchmarks from the literature. We identify the critical reasoning gap in current architectures and argue for trade-offs between the future potential of direct optimization and the auditability of tool-augmented optimization. Even future, more powerful models might opt for tool-making to improve operational efficiency for repetitive families of problems.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

Authors:
Dong Hyun Jeong↗Feng Chen↗Jin-Hee Cho↗Lance M. Kaplan↗Audun J{\o}sang↗Soo-Yeon Ji↗

arXiv:2606.15767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

Authors:
NVIDIA↗Aditi↗Niket Agarwal↗Arslan Ali↗Jon Allen↗Martin Antolini↗Adeline Aubame↗Alisson Azzolini↗Junjie Bai↗Maciej Bala↗Yogesh Balaji↗Josh Bapst↗…

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A Lindbladian for holographic Brownian motion

Authors:
Daichi Takeda↗

arXiv:2606.17909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We derive a Lindbladian description of holographic Brownian motion in the high-temperature regime. Starting from the influence functional for a trailing string endpoint, we identify the corresponding quantum master equation and prove that it is completely positive and trace-preserving. We determine the coefficients of the Lindbladian explicitly for two holographic backgrounds: the BTZ black hole and the AdS$_5$ black brane, restricting in the latter case to the endpoint fluctuation along the $x^1$-direction. We then analyze the time evolution of phase-space moments, energy relaxation, and steady states.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Authors:
Jiangtao Kong↗Peijun Zhao↗Chun-Fu Chen↗Youngwook Do↗Shaohan Hu↗Tianyi Zhou↗Huajie Shao↗

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units

Authors:
Tingting Chen↗Shaojun Wang↗Huaye Zhang↗Diqiong Jiang↗Chenglizhao Chen↗

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown strong potential for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. However, enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and editable facial expression control remains fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic conflicts between speech-driven facial dynamics and explicit expression signals. Existing methods rely on implicit multimodal fusion, leading to spatial entanglement and temporal instability. We present EmoZone-Talker, a novel framework that reformulates audio-driven facial animation as a structured spatial-temporal coordination problem under cross-modal conflicts. Our approach introduces an explicit spatial disentanglement and temporal dynamics modeling of facial motion. Specifically, we propose Synergy Zones with Prioritized Attention Bias (SZ-PAB) to explicitly decouple modality contributions via region-wise constraints guided by anatomical priors, and a Channel-Independent Temporal AU Encoder (CIT-AE) to model temporally coherent AU dynamics. By integrating these representations into 3D Gaussian deformation, EmoZone-Talker enables precise and interpretable control over facial expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves expression controllability and realism, with notable gains in upper-face accuracy and temporal coherence, while preserving high rendering quality and accurate lip synchronization. Code will be publicly released to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Membership Inference Attacks against Large Audio Language Models

Authors:
Jia-Kai Dong↗Yu-Xiang Lin↗Hung-Yi Lee↗

arXiv:2603.28378v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first systematic Membership Inference Attack (MIA) evaluation of LALMs. Using Multi-modal Blind Baselines based on textual, spectral and prosodic features, we demonstrate that common audio datasets exhibit near-perfect train/test separability (AUC ~ 1.0) even without model inference, thus MIA may primarily detect distribution shift. We therefore introduce a blind-baseline protocol to control for this confound. Under this protocol, we identify that the distribution-matched datasets enable reliable MIA evaluation without distribution-shift artifacts. We benchmark multiple MIA methods and conduct modality disentanglement experiments on these datasets. The results reveal that LALM memorization is cross-modal, arising only from binding a speaker's vocal identity with its text. These findings establish a principled standard for auditing LALMs beyond spurious correlations. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/snooow1029/ALM_MIA.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

FP8 is All You Need (Part 2): Efficient Ozaki-Bailey Style FFT Through Tensor-core Garner Reformulation and Kulisch Escape Route

Authors:
Satoshi Matsuoka↗

arXiv:2606.23698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra (B300) cuts FP64 vector throughput to ~1.3 TFLOPS per GPU, roughly 30x below B200 and well below the level at which bandwidth-limited FP64 workloads stay memory-bound. The Ozaki Scheme II framework recovers FP64-equivalent throughput by routing dense matrix multiply through FP8 tensor cores with a mantissa-sliced Chinese-remainder reconstruction. A companion Part (1) paper covers dense GEMM, batched GEMV, stencils, and SpMV; this paper adds the fifth canonical primitive, the 3-D FFT. We present Ozaki-Bailey FFT, an emulated 3-D FFT via the Bailey six-step decomposition with both 1-D FFT GEMMs on FP8 tensor cores. Bailey's small inner factor k ~ sqrt(N) (k=32 for N=1024) puts the kernel in the regime k

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Spectral Retrieval-Augmented Time-Series Forecasting

Authors:
Huu Hiep Nguyen↗Minh Hoang Nguyen↗Dung Nguyen↗Hung Le↗

arXiv:2606.19412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting leverages historical patterns to predict future values, but traditional methods face challenges when dealing with complex, non-stationary patterns that are difficult to memorize during training. Retrieval-augmented approaches have emerged as promising solutions by retrieving similar historical patterns to enhance predictions. However, existing retrieval methods suffer from two fundamental limitations: spectral blindness, which overlooks critical frequency-domain characteristics that capture underlying periodic structures, and temporal recency, which treats all historical data equally without emphasizing recent, more relevant patterns. In this paper, we propose SpecReTF, a novel retrieval method that addresses these issues by converting time series into windowed frequency representations, measuring similarity with a combined metric that captures both amplitude and phase information. To balance recency and historical context, we apply an exponential moving average weighting scheme that emphasizes recent windows. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SpecReTF outperforms time-domain retrieval methods, achieving superior forecasting accuracy across diverse, non-stationary time series.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Probing Semantic Alignment, Lexical Invariance, and Syntactic Influence in LLM Metaphor Processing

Authors:
Fengying Ye↗Shanshan Wang↗Lidia S. Chao↗Derek F. Wong↗

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success reveals about metaphor processing. We present a diagnostic analysis that examines the limits of behavioral evidence by probing three complementary dimensions: semantic attribute alignment, lexical invariance, and syntactic sensitivity. Using geometric probing, we assess whether model-generated interpretations align with reference semantic attributes; through context-varying substitution, we analyze the stability of lexical associations between metaphorical and literal expressions; and via controlled syntactic perturbations, we examine sensitivity in metaphor detection. Our analysis reveals that LLM-generated interpretations can exhibit semantic drift relative to reference attributes; stable lexical anchors persist across contextual conditions, potentially supporting conventional metaphors while biasing novel metaphors requiring contextual integration; and detection performance is sensitive to syntactic irregularities. These findings suggest that strong behavioral performance may reflect heterogeneous underlying signals, highlighting the need for caution when interpreting metaphor benchmarks as evidence of robust, integrated semantic understanding.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Fusing Transferred Priors and Physics-based Decomposition for Underwater Image Enhancement

Authors:
Haochen Hu↗Yanrui Bin↗Zhengyan Zhang↗Minchen Wei↗Chih-yung Wen↗Bing Wang↗

The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: https://github.com/Haru2022/P2-UIE.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FitText: Evolving Agent Tool Ecologies via Memetic Retrieval

Authors:
Kyle Zheng↗Han Zhang↗Renliang Sun↗Chenchen Ye↗Wei Wang↗

arXiv:2605.02411v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A semantic gap separates how users describe tasks from how tools are documented. As API ecosystems scale to tens of thousands of endpoints, static retrieval from the initial query alone cannot bridge this gap: the agent's understanding of what it needs evolves during execution, but its tool set does not. We identify this retrieval interface, not planning, as the binding constraint on end-to-end agent performance, and introduce FitText, a training-free framework that makes retrieval dynamic by embedding it directly in the agent's reasoning loop. FitText treats retrieval as test-time evolution of hypotheses: the agent generates natural-language pseudo-tool descriptions (revisable beliefs about the tool it needs), refines them iteratively using retrieval feedback, and explores diverse alternatives through stochastic generation. Memetic Retrieval adds evolutionary selection pressure over candidate descriptions, guided by a tool memory that avoids redundant search. On ToolRet (three domains), FitText's reformulation strategies improve NDCG@5 by 2.7 to 10.6 points over static query retrieval across all base models; on StableToolBench (16,464 APIs) with GPT-5.4-mini, Memetic reaches an 84.3% pooled pass rate, a 26.7-point absolute gain over static query retrieval.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Large Language Models Do Not Always Need Readable Language

Authors:
Jiayi Zhu↗Haoxuan Peng↗Junxi Wang↗Liang Ke↗Chen Zhang↗Linfeng Zhang↗

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly prompted and interfaced with human-readable natural language, even when the intended reader is another model. This paper investigates whether semantic information can be encoded in compact, non-standard textual forms that sacrifice human readability while remaining recoverable by LLMs. We refer to this class of model-centric textual representations as BabelTele, approached here not as a fixed protocol but as an empirical probe into LLMs' capacity to generate and interpret such representations. Through readability diagnostics, model likelihood measures, human questionnaires, and downstream task evaluations, we find that BabelTele can substantially depart from ordinary natural language while preserving core semantics for instruction-tuned LLMs. As a task-agnostic representational paradigm, BabelTele demonstrates high information density, maintaining 99.5% semantic fidelity even when the text volume is condensed to 27.9% of its original length. We further evaluate its semantic robustness in cross-model transfer, agent memory, and multi-agent communication. Results suggest that BabelTele can reduce context overhead while generally maintaining reliable downstream performance, although its effectiveness depends on the compressor-reader pair and task setting. These findings indicate that human readability, natural-language typicality, and model-side semantic recoverability can be partially decoupled, opening a path toward model-native representations in future exploration of LLM systems.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MoCA-Agent: A Market-of-Claims Code Agent for Financial and Numerical Reasoning

Authors:
Abdelrahman Abdallah↗AbdelRahim A. Elmadany↗Sameh Al Natour↗Hasan Cavusoglu↗Adam Jatowt↗Muhammad Abdul-Mageed↗

arXiv:2606.11537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial and tabular question answering requires more than fluent reasoning: answers must be grounded in the exact facts, formulas, units, signs, and scales that support them. A single misread cell or incorrect operation can silently produce a plausible but wrong result. We introduce \textsc{MOCA-Agent}, a market-of-claims code agent that replaces free-form multi-agent debate with claim-level verification. The system decomposes each question into typed atomic claims, asks specialist trader agents to buy or sell those claims, clears their orders into confidence-weighted accept/reject decisions, and synthesizes an executable Python program from market-supported evidence. A code-aware verifier then checks the program for execution, structural consistency, and common financial reasoning errors, with at most one market-aware repair round. Across ten public benchmarks spanning financial numerical reasoning, general tabular reasoning, ESG question answering, and multimodal chart reasoning, \textsc{MOCA-Agent} achieves strong performance using a fixed Qwen3.6-27B backbone, including $78.3\%$ on FinQA, $76.0\%$ on FinanceMath, $71.2\%$ on MultiHiertt, $86.9\%$ on ESGenius, and $85.6\%$ average on FinChart-Bench. These results show that aggregating evidence at the level of atomic claims, rather than whole answers, improves robustness in high-stakes numerical reasoning.\footnote{The code and data are available: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/MoCA-Agent.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Bayesian control for coding agents

Authors:
Theodore Papamarkou↗Vladislav Smirnov↗Viktor Mazanov↗Artem Vazhentsev↗Preslav Nakov↗Timothy Baldwin↗Artem Shelmanov↗

Modern coding agents pair LLM generators with various tools, including cheap diagnostics and expensive verifiers. The tool-use decisions are typically governed by orchestrators that often use fixed rules and ignore uncertainty. We formulate orchestration as cost-sensitive sequential hypothesis testing: a Bayesian controller maintains a belief over candidate correctness and dynamically decides whether to gather more evidence, refine the candidate, verify it, or stop. Across six generators and nine coding benchmarks, Bayesian control proves to be most valuable when verification is costly and critics are informative but imperfect. Beyond control, the belief state yields an interpretable correctness score that outperforms token-probability and raw tool-success baselines for uncertainty quantification.

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